Hope USAIR pulls through

[SWA/FO]

PSA was bought by USAir and the equipment was soon moved back east. Routes were changed and/or canceled. PSA was a great company but not after USAir bought them.

This is when SWA made a big move for CA traffic.

 

[350DRIVER]

Lack of any west coast route structure years ago when they had the chance to branch out was probably the start of the downfall. Add in numerous different equipment fleets, mx costs, etc, and you are going to run into trouble. You cannot compete in this ultra-competitive industry without having a sound business plan in place, for the future, and allowing yourself to grow when the time presents itself and is appropriate. Bad management, p!ss poor planning and bad decisions are really the root of this problem. Jet Blue, AWA, Air Tran, and others have all taken advantage of "adapting" and "expanding" to ensure future success, something that Airways has not done. I think this may be a little too much too late, a point is going to come where the majority will say enough is enough. I wish the entire Airways group the best, they deserve nothing less.

3 5 0

 

[FlyFastLiveSlow]

Siegal leaving and taking 5 million is enough to make me Gag!! The rest of the employees are taking pay cut after pay cut and this guy comes in for a year and some change... doesn't fix anything and then bails out and takes 5 million. Its just plain Wrong... Unethical!

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.....the class division grows.....the aristocracy gets stronger.

 

[KeroseneSnorter]

KeroseneSnorter - that is interesting to me. I'm not trying to argue, but am curious what you think even a dream team for management could have done. There are some obvious things like consolidating the fleet, but I don't think that could be done timely enough nor would it have enough impact to make a difference. How do you change their undiversified route structure that becomes more competitive by the day? Give some inputs please.

The fleet consolidation would obviously take time as you said. However their solution for the problem was to park the planes that were paid for and buy a bunch of new RJ's at 15 to 20 mil a pop. But for now i'll look at what could have been done with what they had.

Aircraft scheduling: we had 737-200's flying routes that taxed their range, LGA to FLL, Bos to PBA, darn near a fuel emergency when it left the ground in the summer, while running a 737 300 or 400 from ILM to CLT (30 min) with the center tanks dry and only half fueled mains. I commuted to work on a 757 for a 45 minute flight! An airplane designed to go transcontinental doing a 45 minute run everyday half full of people. Take BOS for example, any given time of the day in line you would see the rest of the carriers taxiing out in 75's and 76's headed for south florida full. All except us, we hauled the same number of people on the same route, but we did it with 3 737-200's with 3 crews and 3 times the amout of fuel burned. Small example, but this type of waste was system wide.

Fares, again waste everywhere, They created Metrojet to compete with SWA, nice idea except that they never actually competed with SWA. Who was their main competetion? Ourselves! LGA to PBA, We went from hauling full loads everyday out of NYC at full fare, to hauling full loads everyday at cut rate prices. If you wanted first class to PBA, you had to connect through CLT! It was like this at 90% of Metrojunks routes.

We had Dorniers and RJ's doing 3+ hour flights almost in formation to cities that 1 737 or md-80 would have served.(PIT BHM being one) Passengers do not want to be stuffed in a TP or small jet for 3+ hours, plain and simple. In the mean time there were 320's and 73's running CLT to GSP (12 minutes flight time) half full. At one time they actually had a 767 doing the CLT GSP run!!!!!!!!! An airplane designed to fly 12+ hours with the highest paid crews at the airline doing a 12 minute hop.

Post CH-11 restructering to pull down pit and build up PHL! What on earth are you thinking making PHL your primary NE hub!!?? A mouse can fart anywhere near Philly and they drop down to one active runway. I never flew through PHL on anything near scheduled time. Pit in the mean time while not being the population or traffic base they used to be, has 4 runways, maint. facilities and if you come through PIT and are taking large delays that means that your in the middle of a massive blizzard. Used to do PIT in some of the worst weather imaginable and maybe take a 10 min delay.......Phl same senario...3 hours! Same with gate space etc. Waiting on the ground after landing for a hour for a gate in PHL was not uncommon.

Work groups: Two years ago most of the work groups were willing to work with managment to come to something that could make money. ALPA would have flown SWA rates no problem, IAM would have been harder due to their loss of things like TUG driving and such but not impossible. Instead managment negotiated their "company saving" contracts and then before the ink was dry proceeded to ignore the new contracts. Bad faith tactics all the way around, employees saw managment as the number one enemy out there and didn't trust a single word out of their mouths. You cannot destroy someones retirement, lie, threaten, fire, and intimidate employees and expect to have those same employees to give one fuzzy rats rear what the customer thinks! Bethune was tough at Contenental during their comeback, but at least he had integrity and didn't lie and steal from the employees. If you read his interviews he is the first one to say that stomping on your employee group is the quickest way to destruction. Tough decisions require honesty, not floggings. The labor groups would have responded and given the needed amount in consessions and work rules without the destruction of the trust and teamwork if they had been given the chance. Instead they saw Wolf, Seigal, and Lakefield, as thieves coming into their home and stealing them blind. Who is more impotrant to a company? The CEO that spends 2 years here with no vested interest, or the employee that spends 30 years here and the company is his or her home and family?

The list goes on and on, and I know I am nothing more than a pilot, not a business guru, but these things that I have listed are simple common sense items that even the smallest business owner can see.

When you are trying to fix a proplem, do not create new ones for yourself, do not copy a failing competetors business model, take from the boys that are making money. U started taking pages out of DAL's and Uniteds playbooks considering RJ's and route structures, when they should have been sending spies sniffing around SWA.

USAir two years ago still had many many loyal customers and employees..........neither of which they have today. 90% of that result can be directly tracked back to poor management and their short sighted views on the business world.

Of course I am just a dumb a$$ pilot so what do I know. And don't bother to ask any other employee group what the problem may be or how to fix it either. After all they just run the day to day operations and deal with the people providing the saleries (Passengers) on a daily basis so how could they possibly know anything about running an airline.

 

[414Flyer]

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.....the class division grows.....the aristocracy gets stronger.

"Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains."

And all that nonsense. You would make Marx and Lenin proud.

 

[KeroseneSnorter]

Oh, I forgot a real nice example of managment idiocy.

The company would moniter growth factors among other things on various routes. We actually had some routes that had say 3 flights a day with a 737. The genuis that did this would look at the monthly load growth factor. Well when a particular station ceased having passenger growth, They would drop a flight into that city or downsize the airplane. Only problem was they would not look at why the growth had stopped..........On several occasions it was because every airplane went 100% FULL and was still leaving passengers at the gate that wanted to give us money for their transportation. Instead of downsizing they should have up sized or added another flight.

No department seemed to speak to any other one.

Back about 2001 or so we started a huge marketing campaign in Chicago for a non-stop flight from MDW to BOS. The airplane was to be the 737-200. They spent millions on advertising on TV, Newpapers, and radio. Only problem is that the 737-200 could not come off of MDW's short runways and be able to haul more than about 50 pax and still have enough fuel to make it to boston! End result, millions pissed away, not one MDW BOS fight ever flew, turns out to break even, needed to haul about 25 more passengers than was possible on that route with that airplane. Why? Because marketing never thought to ask operations if it could even be done before committing to doing it! I guess they figured that marketing knows more about aircraft flying than Dispatchers or pilots do,

 

[skykid]

Great examples, thanks KS. Good luck.

 

[IB6 UB9]

Great post KS. It is becoming painfully obvious that the likes of Wolf, Seigal, and Lakefield couldn't care less whether or not the company makes money, they just have to act CEOish for a couple of years and take a lottery like sum of dough with them laughing all the way to the bank. It is criminal. They conduct a train wreck even further off the tracks, smiling behind the scenes, stuffing money away while at the same time derailing thousands of employees livelihoods. Sounds a little like the spawn of Lorenzo.

 

[Smoking Man]

KeroseneSnorter

Wow you and I agree on something, Those Dornier flights Pit to BHM, did need to be a different airplane, if we needed fuel for WX you could not take all 32 pax's.

Also the flow of aircraft in and out of pit was the best out of all the hubs.

 

[100LL... Again!]

I LOVE livefast's idiot ramblings.

Especially since Nov. Rant on, you little socialist - us conservatives will protect you from your own delusional fantasies, even though you scarcely deserve it.